Oral Storytelling Web

Inspiration

Tales which those of note pass round during discourses on moonlit nights and amid the breezes of the late hours of the night and the fragrant odours of the flowers –the inclusion of them in sermons, and their consideration from every aspect in the viewing of accounts of those former ages, is something peculiar and special to those who ponder and reflect.

From “A History of the Western Sanhaja” by Shaykh Sidya Baba (deceased in 1924) of the Awlad Abyayri (Mauritania), from H. T. Norris, Saharan Myth and Saga, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972, p. 161

Illustration inspired by a rock art painting in the Eastern Cape, South Africa

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When I asked one of the most successful singers [of tales] with whom I became acquainted whether he could sing this or that song, he replied to me: ‘I can sing any song there is because God has planted this gift for singing in my heart. He supplies my tongue with the word without my having to search for it. I have not learned to sing any of my songs; everything gushes out of my insides, out of myself.

Wilhelm Radloff (mid 19th century-1918), quoting a Kirghiz epic, in “Samples of Folk Literature from the North Turkic Tribes” translated by Gudrum Böchter Sherman with Adam Brooke Davis, Oral Literature, 5: 84; this is a part of Radloff’s book Aus Sibirien, published in Leipzig, 1854